As many owners of mirrorless cameras can attest, it can take some time to get used to some of the different shooting capabilities that our mirrorless camera gear provides. One of the things that seems odd to use to photograph birds in motion, is a frame rate of 60 frames-per-second. Especially when on many cameras, the first frame locks focus for the balance of the run. Most of us have been taught to use continuous auto-focus when photographing birds in…

People who enjoy bird photography can attest to the fact that patience is a virtue when it comes to capturing images of birds-in-flight. We simply never know when nature will present photo opportunities. As a result we need to keep aware of our surroundings, and our finger on the shutter release! During the past couple of months I’ve been out doing some field work for an upcoming eBook about hand-held bird photography.

Although I bought my first DSLR in 2012, I only started dabbling in nature photography in 2015. After a few frustrating efforts trying to capture birds with the 55-200mm lens, I decided to take the plunge and buy my first serious lens – the Nikkor 200-500mm f/5.6, at the end of 2015.

In this article, I will guide you to the world’s largest northern gannet colony. The Bass Rock (that’s Baah-ss, not the 4 string instrument) is a (very) big volcanic basalt rock in Firth of Forth, just off the coast 20 miles from Edinburgh. Quite old, too: 320 million years, give or take.

At least at one point of time in our photography journey, almost all of us want to try our hands on wildlife photography. Be it an attempt to photograph a bird in our backyard or taking a jungle safari, it is pretty rare to see someone with a camera not attempting to shoot the wild side. For a person like me living in India, the land of tigers & elephants to a wide array of resident and migratory birds flocking…

When I decided to sell my professional Nikon cameras and glass and make the switch to Fujifilm, the question I had was “will I still be able to photograph birds?” During spring migration last year, I was fortunate enough to be able to get a hold of the Fujifilm XF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR lens. In this article, I will let you know how the X-T2 and XF 100-400mm combo stacked up for bird photography.

In this in-depth Wildlife Photography Tutorial, we put together some of the best material we have published to date on photographing wildlife. Most of the information comes from myself (Robert Andersen), but a few extra tips are shared by other talented PL team members like Tom Redd. Instead of creating separate articles on each topic, we thought it would be a good idea to compile everything into a single piece, so that our readers could get the best out of…

Over the past few months I’ve been getting more and more emails from people doing some investigation of smaller sensor, mirrorless camera systems like Micro 4/3 and Nikon 1. Quite a few of them are like me in that they are seniors, or soon-to-be seniors, with an interest in bird photography. Most are looking for a smaller, lighter system that they can use for extended periods of time, rather than having to lug heavy DSLR bodies and lenses around.

It has been well over a year since we held our first reader event at Bird Kingdom in Niagara Falls, Canada. We are planning another reader event at the facility on Saturday February 11th. I’ll be there before the attraction opens to the public at 9:30 AM so attendees will have some ‘meet and greet’ time.

In the past, bird photography was reserved for those with very deep pockets. With long prime lenses costing more than $8000, their high prices excluded those of us with more modest budgets from the party. However, with the advent of relatively inexpensive super-zoom lenses from Sigma and Tamron, and even some from the mirrorless camera makers, it is much easier to get into bird photography these days. In this article, I want to give you some bird photography tips for…

Making a change to one’s camera kit is always a good reason to go out to get some practice using it outside and indoors. I went out to Bird Kingdom in Niagara Falls Ontario a few days ago with my Nikon 1 V3 and CX 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 lens to practice my hand-holding technique photographing birds using slower shutter speeds.

I recently made a couple of changes to my photography gear which resulted in me adding a Nikon 1 V3 to my kit and selling my J4 with WP-N3 waterproof housing. I wanted to put my new acquisition to the test and decided to photograph some water birds. So, I headed off to La Salle Park in Burlington Ontario as I had heard that there was over a thousand birds at that location. While the winter is often drab and dull,…

My apologies for being silent here at Photography Life for over a month! I’ve been away on an extended holiday/field trip in New Zealand with my wife, and our busy schedule didn’t allow time to prepare any new articles for Photography Life. While the vast majority of our New Zealand photography focused on landscape images for our planned photography e-book, I did have the chance to capture a selection of photographs of various marine birds and mammals during our trip.

Being married to a university professor has its advantages (and disadvantages, but this is not the time or place…), the most important being the international conferences and research trips. After-all, if one airline ticket and hotel is already paid for, it makes sense to buy another ticket and make a holiday of it, right? So when my wife announced a research visit to Chile in 2013, I didn’t need much encouragement to join her once most of her work was…

I’ve been quite busy with client work lately and I decided that I needed a break. So, today I headed out to photograph birds-in-flight with my Nikon 1 J5. As most folks know, this camera does not have a viewfinder, so I used four, thick elastic bands to attach my Zacuto Z-Finder to the rear of the J5. It ended up being reasonably snug against the back of the camera. While not particularly elegant looking, it did get the job done.

In today’s digital photography age, most novice bird photographers are happy just capturing a bird portrait with their cameras. After a while, the natural progression is to try and capture some action shots of birds in flight, but that is where most avian photographers struggle. Why? The answer is quite simple; they don’t have enough shutter speed!

I had a small break in my hectic schedule today and I used it to spend a bit of time at Bird Kingdom in Niagara Falls capturing some high ISO test images with my Nikon 1 J5. While I wouldn’t normally use ISO-6400 for all of my images purposely, I did so today at Bird Kingdom. As you look at the sample images some of the EXIF data will look quite strange in terms of using a high ISO setting…